Bob Dylan wrote those
words in a vastly different, more complex context, but somehow they come to
mind each time a great actor or a charismatic star chooses to lend their name
and presence to an abysmal film.

There is really no
other way of putting it: White is
abysmal. It is boring, dull, vacuous, vapid and worse, pretentious. Each frame,
each word suggests that director Uday Ananthan felt he had a grand sweeping
romance on his hands. If that is what you were thinking, Mr Ananthan, you got
it wrong. White is not grand. It is pompous.

Which brings us to that
question begging to be asked: What’s a talented, much-loved veteran like Mammootty
doing in a dump like this? A multiple National Award-winning Malayalam actor
and one of contemporary Indian cinema’s best, Mammukka – as he is fondly known
in Kerala – has done a fair share of unapologetically commercial, loud, OTT
films through his nearly 40 years on screen. Just recently, he played a
deplorably misogynistic cop in the Eid release Kasaba. But even that spool of nonsense had entertaining elements,
such as its suspense and the leading man’s amusing signature swagger. White does not have even that. It is inert
and bland.

It all begins when
Roshni Menon (Huma Qureshi) is posted in London on work. As she grapples with a
mean boss in a foreign land, she finds herself saving an attractive elderly man
who is about to fall (or was he jumping?) in front of a train at a London metro
station one day. They part ways, but soon he starts forcing himself into her
life in bizarre, aggressive ways. He turns out to be Prakash Roy (Mammootty), a
billionaire with a sad past. Many wanderings and schmoozing sessions later,
there comes a big reveal. You will catch it if you have not slept off by then.

Someone please tell
Ananthan that all the low-angle shots in the world, all the polish in Pradeep
Maralgattu’s art design, all those frames of pretty castles and picturesque
London by DoP Amarjeet Singh cannot compensate for poor writing. The screenplay
by Praveen Balakrishnan, Nandini Valsan and the director himself lacks flesh
and maturity. It also falls flat on its face with its attempts at originality
within clichés.

Formulaic
filmmakers across Indian languages have long held that every romance must perforce
be preceded by a clash between the hero and the heroine, often a silly imagined
grievance. Possibly in a bid to contrive some such tension, or perhaps because
the writers deemed it cute, or perhaps to build him up as a commanding figure, White has Roy being persistently
obnoxious with Menon – turning up at her office and demanding that she leave
with him “in two minutes” no less, being rude to her boss, and denigrating her
in conversation.

(Spoiler alert) It
gets so ridiculous that at one point Roy fakes a situation where Menon thinks
she is about to be mugged, raped or killed on a dark, deserted street before he
drives in in slow motion to a ramped-up background score, pops open a champagne
bottle and wishes her for her birthday. As if the film’s Malayalam dialogues
are not clunky enough, White also
features some terribly clumsy English dialogues. On that London street, as they
stand beside his luxury car, he tells her in a grandiose tone: “I never wanted
to be the first person to wish you, neither the last. But I wanted to be a
person to wish you.” What the heck does that even mean?

Despite all this
boorishness and verbosity, she falls in love with him.

Neither star comes
off well in this film. Mammootty is weighed down by the effort to make
laughable dialogues sound imposing. Qureshi – now in her fifth year in Bollywood,
and making her Mollywood debut here – is pretty but expressionless, and weighed down by
distracting false eyelashes. Both are weighed down by a three-decades-plus age
difference and zero chemistry.

To be fair, the screenplay
defies trends in one respect: it does not play down Mammootty’s 64 years (making
him all the more attractive as a result). In one scene, a hooligan at a casino
addresses Roy as “Uncle” and asks Menon if he is her teacher or boss. The
director may well claim then that such a young female star was cast opposite
Mammootty because White is meant to
be an older-man-younger-woman romance, and not a continuation of commercial
cinema’s conviction that women of Mammukka’s age are not worth loving. Hmm. That
is no excuse though for the absolute lack of a spark between the leads, which
culminates in one of the most awkward embraces ever exchanged by a man and
woman on screen.

Everything in White – including its title – is geared
towards a glaring effort to impress. The sound design by Rajesh P.M., for
instance, is over-played to the point of being grating. The crunch of Menon’s
shoes on the ground as she walks away from Roy’s mansion is particularly
irksome in its exaggeration. However much sound and fury you may add to it, hot
air is hot air.

The most
interesting thing that happened to me through this film’s 149 minutes and five
seconds running time is that a guy in the same row as mine at the theatre where
I watched it began loudly humming Sau
tarah ke from the Hindi film Dishoomat
some point. I did not ask whether he was trying to assuage his boredom but I do
know that I suffered two cancelled shows and 160 km (read: seven hours) of
travel over three days through the Delhi rain before I got third-time ‘lucky’
with White. Travel and ticket money
can be forgiven, but time is priceless, Mr Ananthan. You owe your viewers a big
debt.

Footnote on the subtitles: It is great that
more Indian films are being released with subtitles outside their home
territories, and sometimes even within. Bad subs though are self-defeating and White’s are among the worst I’ve seen in
recent times. The name “Charlotte” appears as “a lot” on screen” at one point,
I spotted at least one mistranslation, and I am sure we can all agree that it
is not okay to spell “heartbreak” as “heart brakes”.

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About Me

Anna MM Vetticad is an award-winning journalist, journalism teacher and author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic, an overview of the Hindi film industry presented through an account of a year in which she watched every single Bollywood film released in India’s National Capital Region. A journalist since 1994, she has worked with India Today, The Indian Express and Headlines Today. At HT she hosted her own interview show Star Trek which drew all India’s eminent entertainment personalities. While Anna has spent most of her career as a behind-the-scenes editorial person, she has also reported on most major Indian entertainment and lifestyle events and several international ones including Cannes and the Oscars, in addition to being the film critic for Headlines Today. She is currently reporting and writing for multiple publications on cinema and social issues with a focus on gender concerns. The Adventures of an Intrepid Film Critic is available on amazon.com, ebay.in, flipkart.com, ombooksinternational.com, ombooks.com, infibeam.com, homeshop18.com and dialabook.in among other websites, and in stores across India. Twitter: @annavetticad